BSD firewalls are very nice. Haven't popped OpenBSD on a box, yet, but I ran a firewall with FreeBSd before and it worked beautifully. While everyone else on our Adelphia network (about 2 years ago) was getting scanned and attacked, we were sitting pretty. Worked right up until the machine got fried in a lightning strike.
Of course, I'm now looking into my next setup, which'll like have my OpenBSD box (installing in the next couple weeks) and then a firewall, followed by another firewall, and then my other machines. Since I keep buying stuff in different countries and made by different manufacturers, it's not too likely my local script kiddies are gonna hack their way through. Getting in the OpenBSD box will be hard enough, but then two more firewalls? Hmm..
Growing up around phone phreaks taught me paranoia isn't a state of mind. It's a way of life.
In most countries overseas, US workers are required to pay taxes in the country they're working in. Now, some places that might not be so bad, in others it sucks. I'm sure you'd love to have a job where you earn $120k / year in Sweden, where the government already is nailing you with, hmmm, around 60% tax (I think higher, but no need to quibble). Not only will you pay 60% of the $120k, but then you'll also pay US tax on the amount above $75k. Nice, huh? Most people who aren't paying taxes (at all) on that first $75k are committing tax evasion.
Secondly, apparently you don't know much about marketing, since you can't sell products overseas without having Americans overseas to sell them. So you'll have to have those high-end type people, and you'll probably need to have resources outside the US for call centres, etc. (Unless you think Americans are going to speak the local lingo elsewhere.)
To me the big problem is the true outsourcing to companies that aren't even part of the US economic infrastructure of jobs that CAN be done in the US. A lot of that has started because during some damned BUBBLE (P/E of 500 is a good sign of a bubble stock), a bunch of greedy SOBs decided to import everyone from everywhere else. The stupid ones are still here; the smart went home and started businesses to suck the money out of the U.S.
Security programmes need not be created in the US, but all security programmes by the nature of what they need to do should be open-source for peer review.
I don't know if the DMCA is right in this context. One could start to scream anti-trust (and of course wait until we actually stop being paranoid and bombing the world outside for anything to happen). Microsoft has more or less quashed their competition. While DRM may be fine as an OPTION, having it built-in to prevent compatiblity is working to not compete, but mere to maintain a monopoly status.
While I'm still stuck with MS Office a number of places (especially work), I actually found that I preferred the OpenOffice spreadsheet to Excel. It was, well, better.
No need to flame. From the surface, your opinion is dead-on as far as the law seems, but I think that the use of the DMCA here (actually the DMCA in general) is allowing more companies to maintain the status quo and is flying in the face of capitalism. I love government (legislative) handouts to large corporations, don't you?
Aside from buckling down to maintain a monopoly, has anyone seen substantial change in Office since 2000?
I'm so sick of Forrester research. They've been so pro-Internet for so long that every new wave is a realm of optimism for them. They're predictions are always 'out with the old, in with the new'.
I highly doubt that DVDs are going away any time soon. CDs may not be released as readily, but they thought CDs would die with the advent of the miniDisc. (Who uses that?) The increase in downloading of music has more to do with the paltry and rather pathetically released albums as of late combined with incredibly high prices that with people switching to broaddband for all delivery.
If the switch comes to broadband for delivery by the industry, chances are it will have more to do with corporate greed and the desire for increased control (see failure of DVD Regions to mean anything for more info) that it will with people not desiring physical media.
Today's thought.... Stop piracy and corporate greed. Set fair market prices and compete. Damn oligopolies!
Reality is that the likelihood of extortion and blackmail over previous events in life becomes far less likely if everyone is held accountable. Currently the system is built more around how much money one can throw to make things go away.
The sad state of affairs, particularly in the US, is that everyone is expected to live up to a high level of morality, because everyone hides what they've done wrong. When no one can hide what they've done wrong, the system as a whole becomes far less black and white.
The real issue of privacy is whether or not we can build a system by which equal accountability will be maintained, not whether or not being able to hide one's past is a right.
The concept of the open, free, wonderful Internet is a concept that disappeared the instant the.com TLD was created and the gates restricting users from AOL and other fast-food watching, prime-time television viewing hangouts were removed.
Freedom is a responsibility, not a right. It's been that way for centuries in all reality. Any time you have a huge land-grab with no real regulation or accountability, you eventually have the idiot masses come through and turn it into a grabage heap. Empires grow, empires fall. People start to realise that if everybody can talk at once, very few really listen, and when you bother to listen, most thoughts aren't very well thought-out.
In some ways, for those who don't read about history, politics, and economics, it's a lot like the dating scene. When you start out it's great meeting lots of new people, and you're thrilled. But eventually you get tired of hearing the same stupid, vapid stories from lots of supposedly different people. You select a few to hang out with, even fewer to really confide in and listen to, and that's your life.
I've spent plenty of time online, and a lot of it on the web, or using gopher, or IRC, or Usenet, and I'm simply bored with most of the drivel. It used to be cool to see new homepages. Now it's just dumb. I prefer to connect with my peers, get my information, and then go out in the real world and have a life.
I'm sorry Mr. Auerbach, but while your logic was good, your principles were flawed, much like Marx. Marx's ideas were great, but he foolishly believed people were inherently good. That's where his ideas all went wrong. I think you may have made many of the same assumptions.
Good customer service is a matter of being consistent and providing good service. If you have to bend over backwards for some customer, that's fine, if it's your only customer and they're going to pay you well for it.
The problem I've seen, from little companies to large corporations, is that they'll keep providing "bend-over-backward" service for some clients, to the DETRIMENT OF OTHER CUSTOMERS! That's bad customer service overall.
As the sole IT person, you're going to run into a lot of problems unless you make your work clearly visible and have it adequately scheduled.
First thing, confer with your boss, and try to schedule at least two weeks of where you're not implementing new things, but just doing maintenance.
During these two weeks, you should have meetings scheduled with every department to see what they have planned for IT needs for the next, say, four months. Check to see if they have any money budgeted to address these concerns as well.
Then get a meeting together with your boss, and then with the department heads to schedule and set priority for these tasks. Make a very clear schedule, and be sure to get some wiggle room in there.
When that's signed off, make sure you document everything that gets done, get it signed off when done, and document anything that impedes your completion of schedule. File weekly reports and make sure that every department head gets those.
The key is to make sure that they know what's going on. If they know that you're concretely busy doing work they've agreed on, they're less likely to come and try to change things. When things go wrong, they're likely to understand more, and maybe consider the IT budget more over time.
Anyway, enough rants from the Admin turned Project Manager.
What state are you voting in? I know for a fact that there is plenty of information linking me to my ballot.
When I last voted in Maryland, I showed my ID, and they wrote down the ballot number next to my name. Then I voted, they kept the ballot with my number and gat me what was effectively a receipt with the ballot number on it.
If someone really wanted to check before the time to contest and ask for a recount was over, they could find the sheet with my name, get the ballot number, and go look and whom I chose.
It amuses me to no end that people consider buying SCO to be a valid option to be brought up again and again. There is no point. It would be of benefit to SCO shareholders, and to reward them for putting these idiots in place is not on IBM's agenda.
If IBM were to buy anybody, they might buy Novell, since Novell owns the patent. Relatively speaking, that'd be an end run around SCO. In fact, if you really wanted to have fun as IBM, you'd buy the patent, and sell it to FSF for $1, and have the patented code GPL'ed.
1.) If you're stupid enough to pay attention to a blog as a news reporting source, then you should be very aware of the imbalance of reporting. For news organisations this makes sense, but I'd rather see it as an obligation to effectively receive news credentials.
2.) I think every web site should have a valid method for communicating with the host, but to enforce that everybody post replies to their comments is pretty ridiculous. Honestly, given the amount of time I have to deal with my own site on a daily basis, I'd rather that someone file suit against me than me being required to post something. It's one thing if they request a retraction, etc. Cool. But for me to have to post is stupid.
Ok, so let's say that I'm Joe Consumer who doesn't like a product made by Corporation X. I complain about the product, and the people I had to deal with in getting the product sorted, etc.
Now, let's say that instead of acting as a single corporation, I get replies from manufacturers of the product, product testers, and maybe the customer support person, her supervisor, etc., etc. Any large corporation could find a way to effectively reqard their internal people and swamp me, with my little blog, with lots of replies.
Better yet, let's put this forward to political views! Now smaller groups who don't like what a large group does or says now has to post responses? Right!
I guess this is very pro-democracy in ideal, but it also sounds like tyranny of the majority, with my individual rights of expression possibly being trampled.
(Passing sweeping legislation is often like using a nuclear warhead to kill a fly. Yeah, the fly dies, but so do many others, and it takes a far longer time to clean up the mess.
Being mildy ADHD and a qualified genius according to even the old IQ tests, I've always enjoyed caffeine. It wakes me up, keeps me going, and lets me focus, within reason.
The good thing about caffeine is that it's very self-regulating. I'm lucky in that I don't become chemically dependent (3 pots to zero, no headache; same with 1 pack cigs/day to zero... no effect). If I have too much caffeine, I notice that I start to lose focus, and my stomach starts to growl. While some people may become hungry from the caffeine, I've noticed it primarily in coffee. It's important to note the difference between caffeine and coffee. If I take caffeine pills or drink Mountain Dew or whatever, I don't get hungry. If I drink lots of coffee, the acid levels in my stomach make me want to eat.
Most studies on caffeine that one reads are not done on caffeine itself, but either coffee or tea. Coffee contains over 300 toxins and I don't know how many chemicals there are in tea. Caffeine in pill form raises my blood pressure SLIGHTLY, works much more efficiently (since some of the chemicals in coffee cut the half-life of caffeine dramatically), and doesn't make me crave food.
If you can drink three cups of coffee a day, taking caffeine in pill form isn't likely to kill you, especially if you hate taking pills. It's easier to remember how much caffeine you've consumed in a pill, then remember how many cups of coffee you've had with your friends.
Being the son of a lawyer, I've been trained to read all contracts as if they were written and would be used by the devil himself.
I've been presented with a number of contracts that said more/less that anything I created during my time of employment (not just on company time, not just related to the company itself) would be the intellectual property of the company.
Fortunately, I've either gotten those contracted changed to reflect work relevant to the company, or to exclude prior works that I'm continuing on, or having simply been in countries where my homework (and the advice of a laywer) has shown that those contracts are invalid.
So do a LOT of research into what's in your contract and get that amended if you have to. Your supervisor may change, but the contract likely won't, and you could find yourself with someone firing and subsequently suing you.
(On the flip side, if you're lucky like me, you don't point out the stuff that lets you off the hook, like the NDA I signed that was invalid under the laws it was written because if failed to mention a penalty value. Hee-hee! I can sell the secrets! Same with another non-compete clause that was too broad. Now I can take the secrets and work for your competitor!)
I've often had the experience working for start-ups where in-house software was preferred over anything else, despite dumping well over $500k in development cost into a program that's only half as good as a commercially-supported $200k program.
As has been stated elsewhere, there is the problem of people only staying so many months, but there also is the problem of inertia in a business. If you buy something, then switching to another bought solution is easy. Getting rid of the sacred cow of internal development is difficult.
I fought and lost an uphill battle to chuck internal software development on certain apps. Now that company has all but tanked.
The problem with a lot of telemarketers is that they call at all kinds of odd hours. I mean, if you have friends and family that live carboard cut-out lives and there are never emergencies, you can screen all your calls and be sure to not be woken up. However, I have friends all aroudn the world, and once in a while, they need me at 2 am or so.
The big issue for me has been the recycling of numbers and fax spammers calling them at any time of night. Combine that with telemarketing calls that are at bad hours because some idiot on the wrong coast pulled up the wrong list, and you're starting to get irked.
Re:Can IBM afford to buy ...
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe not buy Novell, but perhaps buy the patent and IP rights for Unix from them. That would make this lawsuit laughable at best.
I don't know if you've seen the Nasdaq ad with Scott McNealy in it talking about washing cars growing up as a great way to learn about business, but check it out if you can.
Aside from the fact that his idea of entrepreneurship seems to be based on something completely out of touch with reality and not a booming business, I also get the feeling that maybe he was breathing a few too many fumes in those days.
A new desktop platform for Sun will not result in a great an wonderful way for them to survive. Maybe if they were push for software developers to build great apps with wonderful support for something like Linux, and Sun was going to do something more than just try to ride on a Linux label once in a while, well then they might get to go.
Sun makes good solid servers. I'm happy with them. But this trying to find an identity out in public is a clear sign of a dying company.
It sounds like the German government wants all computers to be built by big foreign companies, and not small German shops.
This level of taxation would cut into the small margin most small shops make. That means no more guys who come up with creative solutions for problems, no more friendly service. Just packages and long queues waiting for some ignoramus at tech support when the thing breaks. (Plus the shipping time.)
So I guess maybe the MPAA and RIAA would be considered to be the Axis of Evil around here?
Of course, I don't know how many people on here are teenagers. Haven't many anyone pock-faced here, definitely no communists, but because of poor business models, I've met plenty of unemployed.
Having just moved to Minneapolis, I'm thrilled to have real-time traffic congestion online. I wish they'd had this in the Baltimore/D.C. area, but alas, they didn't.
Anyway, this is great, if I'm driving, but what about those of us who take public transportation? There's never any indication of how late something is running.
When I lived in Helsinki, Finland and worked out in Espoo, they had a great system up some places (Tapiola, for instance) that listed the buses coming and how long it'd be until they got there, and sometimes if a bus was delayed, it even had the delay posted.
If you want to bring something traffic-wise from Finland to the U.S., that would be incredibly useful (as would on-time road construction projects).
In my experience of working with users, developers, and computer upgrades, there are several points of failure.
The first comes from the worst written specs by the marketing boys. They know people want features and they even have a nifty little list. Unfortunately, they have no concept about how these features work together and less about how those changes will affect the underlying structure.
The second comes from a general lack of documentation by programmers. I lost count of the number of times I've heard "I'm a programmer. I don't write documentation." It's frustrating because believe it or not, from generation one to generation two of a program, usually at least 50% of the core people have moved on. Lack of documentation means that messages and features are ignored, and out pop the strangest of messages later on, which result in even more time taken up by QA, if QA even exists.
Then there's all the fun of the usability testing people who don't seem to understand that they should weight their results according to how many people will be upgrading versus how many people will be coming new to the system. I've found that new users of a program have less difficulty with new versions than those upgrading, primarily because the usability people are assuming clueless users. Having a clue, it seems, is not good for new versions, unless those new versions still hold old features which no one included documentation for in the new version. (Case in point - old DOS commands worked much better than the GUI for SO many file utilities in Win 98, but MS didn't provide end users with such documentation.)
Anyway, if someone needs help on understanding this stuff for their project, I'm free for consulting. I could use the money, being unemployed and all.
Slashdot Mirror
BSD firewalls are very nice. Haven't popped OpenBSD on a box, yet, but I ran a firewall with FreeBSd before and it worked beautifully. While everyone else on our Adelphia network (about 2 years ago) was getting scanned and attacked, we were sitting pretty. Worked right up until the machine got fried in a lightning strike.
Of course, I'm now looking into my next setup, which'll like have my OpenBSD box (installing in the next couple weeks) and then a firewall, followed by another firewall, and then my other machines. Since I keep buying stuff in different countries and made by different manufacturers, it's not too likely my local script kiddies are gonna hack their way through. Getting in the OpenBSD box will be hard enough, but then two more firewalls? Hmm..
Growing up around phone phreaks taught me paranoia isn't a state of mind. It's a way of life.
Ok, I have a correction. :-D
In most countries overseas, US workers are required to pay taxes in the country they're working in. Now, some places that might not be so bad, in others it sucks. I'm sure you'd love to have a job where you earn $120k / year in Sweden, where the government already is nailing you with, hmmm, around 60% tax (I think higher, but no need to quibble). Not only will you pay 60% of the $120k, but then you'll also pay US tax on the amount above $75k. Nice, huh? Most people who aren't paying taxes (at all) on that first $75k are committing tax evasion.
Secondly, apparently you don't know much about marketing, since you can't sell products overseas without having Americans overseas to sell them. So you'll have to have those high-end type people, and you'll probably need to have resources outside the US for call centres, etc. (Unless you think Americans are going to speak the local lingo elsewhere.)
To me the big problem is the true outsourcing to companies that aren't even part of the US economic infrastructure of jobs that CAN be done in the US. A lot of that has started because during some damned BUBBLE (P/E of 500 is a good sign of a bubble stock), a bunch of greedy SOBs decided to import everyone from everywhere else. The stupid ones are still here; the smart went home and started businesses to suck the money out of the U.S.
Security programmes need not be created in the US, but all security programmes by the nature of what they need to do should be open-source for peer review.
I don't know if the DMCA is right in this context. One could start to scream anti-trust (and of course wait until we actually stop being paranoid and bombing the world outside for anything to happen). Microsoft has more or less quashed their competition. While DRM may be fine as an OPTION, having it built-in to prevent compatiblity is working to not compete, but mere to maintain a monopoly status.
While I'm still stuck with MS Office a number of places (especially work), I actually found that I preferred the OpenOffice spreadsheet to Excel. It was, well, better.
No need to flame. From the surface, your opinion is dead-on as far as the law seems, but I think that the use of the DMCA here (actually the DMCA in general) is allowing more companies to maintain the status quo and is flying in the face of capitalism. I love government (legislative) handouts to large corporations, don't you?
Aside from buckling down to maintain a monopoly, has anyone seen substantial change in Office since 2000?
I'm so sick of Forrester research. They've been so pro-Internet for so long that every new wave is a realm of optimism for them. They're predictions are always 'out with the old, in with the new'.
I highly doubt that DVDs are going away any time soon. CDs may not be released as readily, but they thought CDs would die with the advent of the miniDisc. (Who uses that?) The increase in downloading of music has more to do with the paltry and rather pathetically released albums as of late combined with incredibly high prices that with people switching to broaddband for all delivery.
If the switch comes to broadband for delivery by the industry, chances are it will have more to do with corporate greed and the desire for increased control (see failure of DVD Regions to mean anything for more info) that it will with people not desiring physical media.
Today's thought.... Stop piracy and corporate greed. Set fair market prices and compete. Damn oligopolies!Reality is that the likelihood of extortion and blackmail over previous events in life becomes far less likely if everyone is held accountable. Currently the system is built more around how much money one can throw to make things go away.
The sad state of affairs, particularly in the US, is that everyone is expected to live up to a high level of morality, because everyone hides what they've done wrong. When no one can hide what they've done wrong, the system as a whole becomes far less black and white.
The real issue of privacy is whether or not we can build a system by which equal accountability will be maintained, not whether or not being able to hide one's past is a right.
The concept of the open, free, wonderful Internet is a concept that disappeared the instant the .com TLD was created and the gates restricting users from AOL and other fast-food watching, prime-time television viewing hangouts were removed.
Freedom is a responsibility, not a right. It's been that way for centuries in all reality. Any time you have a huge land-grab with no real regulation or accountability, you eventually have the idiot masses come through and turn it into a grabage heap. Empires grow, empires fall. People start to realise that if everybody can talk at once, very few really listen, and when you bother to listen, most thoughts aren't very well thought-out.
In some ways, for those who don't read about history, politics, and economics, it's a lot like the dating scene. When you start out it's great meeting lots of new people, and you're thrilled. But eventually you get tired of hearing the same stupid, vapid stories from lots of supposedly different people. You select a few to hang out with, even fewer to really confide in and listen to, and that's your life.
I've spent plenty of time online, and a lot of it on the web, or using gopher, or IRC, or Usenet, and I'm simply bored with most of the drivel. It used to be cool to see new homepages. Now it's just dumb. I prefer to connect with my peers, get my information, and then go out in the real world and have a life.
I'm sorry Mr. Auerbach, but while your logic was good, your principles were flawed, much like Marx. Marx's ideas were great, but he foolishly believed people were inherently good. That's where his ideas all went wrong. I think you may have made many of the same assumptions.
I definitely agree on the advice about customers.
Good customer service is a matter of being consistent and providing good service. If you have to bend over backwards for some customer, that's fine, if it's your only customer and they're going to pay you well for it.
The problem I've seen, from little companies to large corporations, is that they'll keep providing "bend-over-backward" service for some clients, to the DETRIMENT OF OTHER CUSTOMERS! That's bad customer service overall.
As the sole IT person, you're going to run into a lot of problems unless you make your work clearly visible and have it adequately scheduled.
First thing, confer with your boss, and try to schedule at least two weeks of where you're not implementing new things, but just doing maintenance.
During these two weeks, you should have meetings scheduled with every department to see what they have planned for IT needs for the next, say, four months. Check to see if they have any money budgeted to address these concerns as well.
Then get a meeting together with your boss, and then with the department heads to schedule and set priority for these tasks. Make a very clear schedule, and be sure to get some wiggle room in there.
When that's signed off, make sure you document everything that gets done, get it signed off when done, and document anything that impedes your completion of schedule. File weekly reports and make sure that every department head gets those.
The key is to make sure that they know what's going on. If they know that you're concretely busy doing work they've agreed on, they're less likely to come and try to change things. When things go wrong, they're likely to understand more, and maybe consider the IT budget more over time.
Anyway, enough rants from the Admin turned Project Manager.
What state are you voting in? I know for a fact that there is plenty of information linking me to my ballot.
When I last voted in Maryland, I showed my ID, and they wrote down the ballot number next to my name. Then I voted, they kept the ballot with my number and gat me what was effectively a receipt with the ballot number on it.
If someone really wanted to check before the time to contest and ask for a recount was over, they could find the sheet with my name, get the ballot number, and go look and whom I chose.
It amuses me to no end that people consider buying SCO to be a valid option to be brought up again and again. There is no point. It would be of benefit to SCO shareholders, and to reward them for putting these idiots in place is not on IBM's agenda.
If IBM were to buy anybody, they might buy Novell, since Novell owns the patent. Relatively speaking, that'd be an end run around SCO. In fact, if you really wanted to have fun as IBM, you'd buy the patent, and sell it to FSF for $1, and have the patented code GPL'ed.
Two points on this.
1.) If you're stupid enough to pay attention to a blog as a news reporting source, then you should be very aware of the imbalance of reporting. For news organisations this makes sense, but I'd rather see it as an obligation to effectively receive news credentials.
2.) I think every web site should have a valid method for communicating with the host, but to enforce that everybody post replies to their comments is pretty ridiculous. Honestly, given the amount of time I have to deal with my own site on a daily basis, I'd rather that someone file suit against me than me being required to post something. It's one thing if they request a retraction, etc. Cool. But for me to have to post is stupid.
Ok, so let's say that I'm Joe Consumer who doesn't like a product made by Corporation X. I complain about the product, and the people I had to deal with in getting the product sorted, etc.
Now, let's say that instead of acting as a single corporation, I get replies from manufacturers of the product, product testers, and maybe the customer support person, her supervisor, etc., etc. Any large corporation could find a way to effectively reqard their internal people and swamp me, with my little blog, with lots of replies.
Better yet, let's put this forward to political views! Now smaller groups who don't like what a large group does or says now has to post responses? Right!
I guess this is very pro-democracy in ideal, but it also sounds like tyranny of the majority, with my individual rights of expression possibly being trampled.
(Passing sweeping legislation is often like using a nuclear warhead to kill a fly. Yeah, the fly dies, but so do many others, and it takes a far longer time to clean up the mess.
Ok, time for my $0.02.
Being mildy ADHD and a qualified genius according to even the old IQ tests, I've always enjoyed caffeine. It wakes me up, keeps me going, and lets me focus, within reason.
The good thing about caffeine is that it's very self-regulating. I'm lucky in that I don't become chemically dependent (3 pots to zero, no headache; same with 1 pack cigs/day to zero... no effect). If I have too much caffeine, I notice that I start to lose focus, and my stomach starts to growl. While some people may become hungry from the caffeine, I've noticed it primarily in coffee. It's important to note the difference between caffeine and coffee. If I take caffeine pills or drink Mountain Dew or whatever, I don't get hungry. If I drink lots of coffee, the acid levels in my stomach make me want to eat.
Most studies on caffeine that one reads are not done on caffeine itself, but either coffee or tea. Coffee contains over 300 toxins and I don't know how many chemicals there are in tea. Caffeine in pill form raises my blood pressure SLIGHTLY, works much more efficiently (since some of the chemicals in coffee cut the half-life of caffeine dramatically), and doesn't make me crave food.
If you can drink three cups of coffee a day, taking caffeine in pill form isn't likely to kill you, especially if you hate taking pills. It's easier to remember how much caffeine you've consumed in a pill, then remember how many cups of coffee you've had with your friends.
Being the son of a lawyer, I've been trained to read all contracts as if they were written and would be used by the devil himself.
I've been presented with a number of contracts that said more/less that anything I created during my time of employment (not just on company time, not just related to the company itself) would be the intellectual property of the company.
Fortunately, I've either gotten those contracted changed to reflect work relevant to the company, or to exclude prior works that I'm continuing on, or having simply been in countries where my homework (and the advice of a laywer) has shown that those contracts are invalid.
So do a LOT of research into what's in your contract and get that amended if you have to. Your supervisor may change, but the contract likely won't, and you could find yourself with someone firing and subsequently suing you.
(On the flip side, if you're lucky like me, you don't point out the stuff that lets you off the hook, like the NDA I signed that was invalid under the laws it was written because if failed to mention a penalty value. Hee-hee! I can sell the secrets! Same with another non-compete clause that was too broad. Now I can take the secrets and work for your competitor!)
I've often had the experience working for start-ups where in-house software was preferred over anything else, despite dumping well over $500k in development cost into a program that's only half as good as a commercially-supported $200k program.
As has been stated elsewhere, there is the problem of people only staying so many months, but there also is the problem of inertia in a business. If you buy something, then switching to another bought solution is easy. Getting rid of the sacred cow of internal development is difficult.
I fought and lost an uphill battle to chuck internal software development on certain apps. Now that company has all but tanked.
The problem with a lot of telemarketers is that they call at all kinds of odd hours. I mean, if you have friends and family that live carboard cut-out lives and there are never emergencies, you can screen all your calls and be sure to not be woken up. However, I have friends all aroudn the world, and once in a while, they need me at 2 am or so.
The big issue for me has been the recycling of numbers and fax spammers calling them at any time of night. Combine that with telemarketing calls that are at bad hours because some idiot on the wrong coast pulled up the wrong list, and you're starting to get irked.
Maybe not buy Novell, but perhaps buy the patent and IP rights for Unix from them. That would make this lawsuit laughable at best.
Ok, so when do I get my handy-dandy game slashbox for the main page of slashdot?
Also, are we only covering electronica as far as games are concerned?
Yeah, if I spoke bloody rikssvenska anymore, it'd sound silly to me. Thank god I speak finlandsvenska, where it doesn't sound half as silly.
Besides, last I checked, wasn't Sweden a clear microsoft dominion anyway, aside from Unix on the back end, and Linux with some uni students?
My opinion is that Mozilla sounds pretty damn ok in Finland, where it counts.
I don't know if you've seen the Nasdaq ad with Scott McNealy in it talking about washing cars growing up as a great way to learn about business, but check it out if you can.
Aside from the fact that his idea of entrepreneurship seems to be based on something completely out of touch with reality and not a booming business, I also get the feeling that maybe he was breathing a few too many fumes in those days.
A new desktop platform for Sun will not result in a great an wonderful way for them to survive. Maybe if they were push for software developers to build great apps with wonderful support for something like Linux, and Sun was going to do something more than just try to ride on a Linux label once in a while, well then they might get to go.
Sun makes good solid servers. I'm happy with them. But this trying to find an identity out in public is a clear sign of a dying company.
Driven the Crown Vic. Still like my <racist_remark>rice burner</racist_remark> better.
Kinda like if I go to a club, then having a small phone that I can simply answer is much nicer than looking like a fool with a big lump in his pants.
It sounds like the German government wants all computers to be built by big foreign companies, and not small German shops.
This level of taxation would cut into the small margin most small shops make. That means no more guys who come up with creative solutions for problems, no more friendly service. Just packages and long queues waiting for some ignoramus at tech support when the thing breaks. (Plus the shipping time.)
So I guess maybe the MPAA and RIAA would be considered to be the Axis of Evil around here?
Of course, I don't know how many people on here are teenagers. Haven't many anyone pock-faced here, definitely no communists, but because of poor business models, I've met plenty of unemployed.
Having just moved to Minneapolis, I'm thrilled to have real-time traffic congestion online. I wish they'd had this in the Baltimore/D.C. area, but alas, they didn't.
Anyway, this is great, if I'm driving, but what about those of us who take public transportation? There's never any indication of how late something is running.
When I lived in Helsinki, Finland and worked out in Espoo, they had a great system up some places (Tapiola, for instance) that listed the buses coming and how long it'd be until they got there, and sometimes if a bus was delayed, it even had the delay posted.
If you want to bring something traffic-wise from Finland to the U.S., that would be incredibly useful (as would on-time road construction projects).
In my experience of working with users, developers, and computer upgrades, there are several points of failure.
The first comes from the worst written specs by the marketing boys. They know people want features and they even have a nifty little list. Unfortunately, they have no concept about how these features work together and less about how those changes will affect the underlying structure.
The second comes from a general lack of documentation by programmers. I lost count of the number of times I've heard "I'm a programmer. I don't write documentation." It's frustrating because believe it or not, from generation one to generation two of a program, usually at least 50% of the core people have moved on. Lack of documentation means that messages and features are ignored, and out pop the strangest of messages later on, which result in even more time taken up by QA, if QA even exists.
Then there's all the fun of the usability testing people who don't seem to understand that they should weight their results according to how many people will be upgrading versus how many people will be coming new to the system. I've found that new users of a program have less difficulty with new versions than those upgrading, primarily because the usability people are assuming clueless users. Having a clue, it seems, is not good for new versions, unless those new versions still hold old features which no one included documentation for in the new version. (Case in point - old DOS commands worked much better than the GUI for SO many file utilities in Win 98, but MS didn't provide end users with such documentation.)
Anyway, if someone needs help on understanding this stuff for their project, I'm free for consulting. I could use the money, being unemployed and all.